Evolve relaunching as free-to-play game on PC July 7, with Xbox One to follow

Developer Turtle Rock Studios has announced that, starting on July 7, its sci-fi co-op shooter Evolve will relaunch on the PC as a free-to-play game. The plan is to make the game free on the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 consoles as well sometime in the future.

In a community forum post, Turtle Rock's co-founders Chris Ashton admitted Phil Robb that when Evolve was released in 2015, the critical reception was mixed and players didn't care for the game's way of handling post-release DLC content. Turtle Rock is going to be updating Evolve to make it better, and it feels making the game free-to-play is a good way to get feedback:

Here's how it's going to work: We're going to make Evolve free on PC as a Beta starting on July 7. This is going to allow us to hit our new server infrastructure really hard and we need your help testing. Stuff could break, and that's our hope, because that will give us time to improve things as we go. We'll parse out major Beta revisions, updates and features over a period of weeks and months -- a plan we're going to continually communicate here. This allows us to test new features and major changes to make our game more accessible and ever closer to the joy we saw when we first showed our baby to the world. Just as importantly, this Beta plan gives us the flexibility and time we need to keep fixing bugs and making Evolve more stable.

The folks who paid for the old version of Evolve won't be forgotten when the game switches to its free-to-play version:

Anyone who owns classic Evolve will be given "Founder" status in the new free version, and all the content you already own comes with you to the new version. As long as we work on Evolve, we will show our appreciation for our committed fans and early adopters with gifts, rewards, and special access. Why? Because you believed like we did, and we will never forget that.

Turtle Rock used its Twitter feed to confirm the plans are to turn Evolve into a free-to-play game on consoles, but no specific date was revealed on when that might happen: